The
room laid out thinly like the air, sparse and shattered by the roar of the
crowd outside.Their infectious words
were cutting mad - rampant tears through the walls and window as I stood, a
nervous wreck.A wreck fit for the
widest highway to halt traffic for hours.It was the best day of my life, and the most frightening.I was not a man that was keen to be so public
with my private life, but here we were, doing exactly what I had always
feared.It was, however, also a good
feeling because, although I had feared it, it was also the one thing that I had
wanted since I was a boy.I took a
breath and began to use her voice in my mind to drown the noises out.And as I stood waiting for her, the words
from outside would slip through, here and there, just like the gumballs that
would fall from my pockets in my youth.

When
life was much different, way back, when I was a boy I loved the movies.And each Saturday morning I would rush down
to spend my day at the movie theater soaked in the fantastical worlds of the
silver screen.On the way there, I would
always stop at Witherby's Candy Shop to stuff my pockets with Witherby's
Mystical Gumballs in preparation for the day.These tiny pieces of painted joy would be difficult to contain in two
small pockets, and would begin to rain and fall as I ran, filled too full at
the candy counter.They would start to
fall one at a time, and I would notice and watch a gumball go bouncing and
rollingacross a busy street or into a
rain gutter.As I would begin to speed
and run downtown, I would stop noticing the sound of the candy-coated colors
falling from my pockets and hitting the pavement, the worries and cares
diminishing with each step closer to the black and white movie, excited and
looking forward to the magical show about to come tumbling forward from the
projection booth, careening across the dusty light of the theater above our
heads, splattering itself across the screen, completely exposed as light -
immeasurably thin and rolled out like raw pastry.

I
met Sara in the summer.It was a
particularly hot southern summer, so I and a group of young boys were, as
usual, collected together at the local swimming hole which we called the 'Old
Man,' named for the nose and eye shaped features that were formed in the cliff
the stoically rose from the water on the other side of the river.It was such a hot day, it had seemed
pointless to gather up a game of baseball at the field out behind Finney’s
junkyard, so we raced our bikes down to the river below the town, where the
train tracks run out into the woods and run on for miles.There were never any ‘old’ people there, so
we could cuss and spit and walk around without our shoes on.Usually the boys would sit along the big
rocks with their feet dangling down in the water talking about things that all
boys do; telling jokes, talking baseball and looking at dirty magazines, filled
with pictures that somehow, never really did anything for me.I would play along like I liked them, but I
was always a little different from the other boys, and I knew it.

“Arrows,”
one of the boys suddenly muttered in the direction of the path leading it’s way
from the field behind the graveyard.Upon
hearing that word, just like those Saturday morning runs, a gumdrop spilled
from my pockets somewhere deep within my soul. There were two girls from school walking down
the path.

Sara
had just scurried toward us and swiftly away from her friend, who had then
continued along the path away from the river. The head nod that they left each
other with implied that they might catch up later for some previously discussed
activity.She was wearing a neon green
bathing suit top, a pair of cut-off jeans, a pair of flips flops, and had a
freshly plucked white daisy sticking out of the side of her dark black
ponytail.

Sometimes,
there is a person in one's lifetime that swoops in and uproots the whole thing
completely.And for seemingly no reason,
at that moment, she was that one for me.It’s strange how something as simple as a singular smile can be so
devastating.She was never one to be
discreet.Sara truly knew how to live
her life, even then.

I
was sitting with my feet in the water, mostly listening; a skill I had
perfected in my short social existence.I never seemed to have much to offer to the conversations had at the
river.This particular summer day the
water creeping over the river stones into the giant standing pool of water
before us was an incomprehensibly rich blue.I remember seeing the color and trying to think how I would describe it
if I were a painter, asking an assistant to go and retrieve a tube of it from
my supply closet.I couldn’t come up
with anything good but I was bored with the particular monologue that Davey
Lohman was into, going on-and-on about chewing tobacco and how it sharpened
thinking for the smart men in town, and how that was why he had been chewing it
for the last week.He always was a
ranting idiot.I always figured that he
just needed to feel like people liked him so he wouldn’t ever shut his mouth
and give them time to decide.

I
was sitting and trying to think of a name for this newly discovered blue in the
water when I heard her voice.“Hey
you!”Sensing that the greeting was
aimed at me, I turned around quickly and, although I was no longer facing the
water, I still saw the color.There were
two drops of it seeming to fall down her face from her dark hair.I recognized her from the neighborhood and
instantly decided that the perfect name for the color, the only possible name
for the unbelievable color, was Sara.Sara blue, and that was what I called her too, but not yet.

“Yeah?”I could have come up with a more
distinguished and graceful response, but, my early teen shyness prevailed and
they were the only words I could come up with in that moment.It didn’t matter to Sara, she wasn’t
listening for any lofty words.

“Can
you follow me for a minute?I have
something to show you.Well, I guess
it’s something that I want to ask you, or talk to you about.I…would you just follow me?”

“Alright.”I was always one of those people who tried to
live my life like a novel, and in a novel, the best chapters always seemed to
follow dialogue like that.So I got up
and followed her.I never really let on
to anybody that I read books, but secretly I loved them and I always sort of
envisioned myself as one of the protagonists from the stories.It was a guilty pleasure which I indulged in
quietly and often.

My
friends said a couple of vaguely ridiculous things at me and I flipped them
off.They were childhood words, slurs,
funny volleys that we could say when old people weren’t around.It was apparent that they would give me a
hard time if I went; and I wouldn’t have, but there was something about this
girl.That blue in her eyes was impossible
to get over.And I was hypnotized into
compliance with her request.

I
had to run to catch up with Sara.She
was out of sight by the time I dragged myself from the ground, dispelled my
friends prodding and brushed myself off in a careful stride that seemed
non-anxious and naturally composed.I
could still hear her wild feet crackling a path into the forest floor.I envisioned that it would fade if she got
too much lead on me, so as soon as I was out of sight of my watchful peers, I
ran.

She
had stopped and was waiting for me when I finally caught up to her.She was standing in a way that I wasn’t used
to.It made me slightly uncomfortable,
but I kept my cool and approached her casually.She was looking down at the ground, arms crossed, and head tilted to the
left side, hiding her eyes, by the time I got close.Then she looked up at me without raising her
head and smiled.It made my heart pulse
faster.It scared me, I had seen that
look before in the movies, I knew what it could mean.I was unsure how to react so I let go.Threw myself to the wind, and there came the
scene in the movie.There was no turning
back.

“What
is it?”Again ungraceful but to the
point, I was out of breath.

“Well
I see you at the water sometimes,” she began to explain, “and you’re very…um…”

“Very
what?”

She
bit her lip and glared at me.“This is
hard,” she explained.

As
anyone in my situation would, I intrinsically knew what she was getting
at.It was as if it had been burned onto
my life since my birth.This moment was
going to happen.These words were
destined to come out of her mouth.I
knew.I may have second guessed it for
some sake of drama or consciousness, or maybe it was just to draw this moment
out and make it more vibrant and colorful, but staring into her eyes, that
incredible wash of blue, I had to help her.“It’s alright,” I assured.

With
a slightly worried and slightly relieved look she smiled a little; slightly
worried because now she was closer to saying it, and slightly relieved that now
she was locked in and she would have to say it.She could no longer run out on her intent and leave it in the air to be
explained as youthful insanity, or a joke.It had become intimate.“Are you
sure?” she asked.She took a step closer
to me and mirrored the movement in kind.

“I think so, yeah.”

She
smiled, and like in the movies, we kissed.First, as if we were taking a test run, and then we picked up pace and
ran it straight into a brick building.‘You break it, you buy it;’ and did we ever.

She
slipped me something in a quick grab of my palm.It later turned out to be three pieces of
paper folded into a small triangle.I
could see that there was writing on it, in blue ball point pen ink.“This will explain everything,” she
said.“Please read the whole thing
before you say anything.”I agreed and
she took it from my hand and put it in my pocket.She pulled me close and whispered in my ear,
“promise you won’t read it until you get home.”

I could feel her lips brush my ear
as she spoke. The feeling that it evoked
was insane.There is still nothing like
it in the entirety of the world.

“I
promise.”

She
kissed me again, this time longer than the last, wide open mouth and the
softest lips.It was as if she wanted to
never stop, or to die here for the chance that, eternity is spent, frozen in
the moment you go out.Her tongue on my
tongue, her silver rings on her perfect fingers on my sweaty back, and her
waist on my palms.Life went from sepia
to Technicolor in an instant.I was
destroyed, and saved.I was in for the
duration, I was hooked.

When
we were finally able to tear our lips apart from each other, and then carefully
our hands, it had only been moments.She
smiled a few more times as she slowly stepped backwards into the field and then
turned away.She looked back several
times before she faded out of sight through the tree-line.Each time smiling, and biting her lower lip.All I could think was, ‘goddamn you Sara
Blue.”

When I came walking out of the
woods back to the group of boys sitting along the rocks I tried to act natural
and calm, as if nothing had happened except friendly advice, maybe about
another girl, or schoolwork.I had taken
a slightly longer path back just to collect myself.I knew I was in for it.As soon as they heard me, they started in
with the chorus of “ooh’s” and “ah’s” and other basic ridiculousness.I knew it was all in good fun, and I played
along.I didn’t smile with guilt, I
played it perfectly cool.I was really
good at it by now.They calmed down a
little bit and asked me what it was all about.I told them that it was about someone at school that she had taken a
liking to, and that she had wanted my opinion on the matter.They basically bought it, we all laughed in
some discomfort and I sat down and plunked my feet in the water as if nothing
had changed.

I sat there for a few minutes while
there was silence.One by one, we were
skimming stones across the water, using the rope swing hanging from an old oak
tree across the river as a target.We
could never hit it, and had decided it was too far away.I had hit it once when I was out here alone
in the morning, thinking, but had never mentioned it since no one would have
believed me and I didn’t want to have to try to prove it to anyone.

We
were sitting there listening to the plunking of the stones when it
happened.It was Billy who broke the
silence with a word that I somehow knew was coming.

“Shot,”
he said.I smiled as if it was a casual
joke but I hated the word.It was
designed to cut hard and deep.As
always, I let it drop.I was
distracted.That blue was hard to get
over.In fact, I never did.

So here I was, standing, years
later.There are a couple of close
friends of mine standing in the room.They were visually uncomfortable at the noise from the street.

“Fucking
arrows!”Out slip two more
gumballs.Sneaky bastards.

Sara is upstairs standing in her
dress.She had decided to wear her prom
dress.In truth, it was the dress that
would have been her prom dress if we had actually gone to the prom.Instead of the prom, we walked down and stood
by the railroad tracks, where we would sit and talk together on summer days,
and together we danced to the sound of the river until midnight.She was crying, I didn’t ask her, but I
assumed it was a mixture of happiness at our moonlight bliss and sadness that
we had to be such outlaws to have it.I
caught her tear on my hand and ran it into her hair as I pulled her closer and
kissed her.We made love for the first
time beneath the stars in a field by the railroad tracks on our way back
home.It was incredible, it was
rebellious, and it was wild.It was
perfect.It wasn’t very far from the
spot were we first kissed and admitted our love.

It was also the spot were I asked
her about today.This spectacular
day.She said a big ‘yes’ with that same
tear rolling down her face.I always
felt like my love was some sort of disease that she caught from me, and that in
some ways she would have been better off without it.I loved her though, and I knew that, all
trade-offs aside, she was very happy.

I was trying to breathe as I waited
for her to emerge, just a couple minutes and we would be together for the rest
of our lives.

When you plan for days such as this
one, there are certain things that you’re supposed to have to plan, like the
honeymoon: I booked a flight to Paris,
the flowers: daffodils, the church: this isn’t exactly a church but it used to
be.It’s my Grand Papa’s house.It used to be a church.He converted it for a deluxe abode when my
Mama was born.He was a widower and the
two of them lived there together, a king and a princess in their castle.Sara’s getting ready in my mother’s childhood
bedroom right now.There are other
things to plan too, like the cake: Sara is allergic to chocolate so we’re
having vanilla, but there are certain things you shouldn’t have to plan, like
police protection.

When
I asked her to marry me, it was autumn.I remember how nervous I was when I asked.Not so much when I asked Sara, I was more
nervous when I asked her parents.It was
so soon after the law changed.I didn’t
want us to be one of ‘those’ couples jumping all over it right away, like we
just wanted to make a point.It was just
that I had been wanting it so much for so long that I couldn’t wait any
longer.I was sure that they would think
that it was far too soon.

I
drove down there early in the morning.Sara had spent the night in my apartment after having a cook-out and
campfire with some friends the night before.I left Sara a note that there were waffles on the counter, and jam in
the fridge, and that I had a couple errands to run.I also left her an empty journal for poetry
on the nightstand hoping it would inspire her to occupy her time with a pastime
that always brought her so much joy, but which she found time for far too
infrequently.

It
was easier than I dreamed it would be.Alison and Jen seemed to have already known it was coming.I think Jen must have seen me coming up the
drive alone and ran to the cabinet for a shot or two of Southern Comfort,
straight from the bottle and downed with a gulp to prepare herself for what was
now an inevitable moment.By the time I
reached the door they were waiting.Alison poured me a coffee and we sat on the porch.All that I had to say was, “I really love
her,” and everything else was all understood.It was as if there was no other way.This was just how it all was supposed to happen.

That
night, I asked her.

The
couch in their hallway reminds me of my tenth grade English teacher.It’s a wooden Morris frame with a firm and
nasty-green cushion, just like the one in his classroom.I despised him, Mr. Hastings.He was the first person that I ever got mad
at about his words.Once, he told our
class about an article recently published in thePost, his favorite magazine, and described
all of the ways in which it was wrong.He handed out the article and allowed us a few moments to read it.Then he began to fume and sputter that no
journal should write such things.He
said that we were all to write a letter to the editor, as an assignment,
explaining that even we, schoolchildren, could see that it was disgusting. As I
read it to myself, my eyes began to well up with water that I imagined was dark
red.

It
was an equal rights article, about the law that a few people in Colorado were trying to
get passed.It used strange words and I
wasn’t quite sure exactly what it was getting at.I decided I would need to read it again.As I got further into the well-written article,
I noticed that it sounded very compassionate and warm.It had soft words, and there was no talk of
heavy handed words from God.It sounded
intellectual and well-informed.I kept
reading.I couldn’t be sure at the time,
but it seemed very important.It almost
seemed as if the article had something to do with me, or that it should be
important to me.I wrote down the
catalog info since I knew that he would take the papers back for the next class
to read.I decided I would run down to
the library in town after school and find the Post and read the article
again.I kept reading.My mind began to drift from the page and I
pictured a group of nice people in Colorado,
people who were more like me than people around here, I thought about them
sitting around with wine and guitars changing laws like they were writing songs
or poetry.It made me feel…

“…will
burn in hell!”He was standing right
next to me now.I could smell him, old
sweat and the faint hint of whiskey.I
couldn’t stand him.I didn’t give him
much of my mental energy, but I was suddenly losing gumballs at a rapid
rate.Luckily my grades allowed me to
graduate early and I went on to University.

Sara came and visited my fist
weekend at College.I had gotten a job
as a typesetter at a small local paper and was able to afford a small one
bedroom apartment above a record store downtown.I budgeted a dime each week to walk down on
Friday, which was payday, and buy a new release on vinyl, mostly to be
neighborly and interact with people.Sara
would come up on Saturday and we would listen to whatever album I had purchased
on Friday night and we would drink wine and dance all night.

On
Sundays we would lay in bed until 9:30 and then I would walk down the street to
the outdoor market and purchase eggs and fruit.I would carry them back and we would eat breakfast and talk all
day.We could talk about anything.And we would talk about everything.We became one mind, and one body in that
bed.They were poetic days, rife with
everything important in life.

When
holidays came I would return home, and we would be ready to burst like a pop
bottle for each other.Here, we had to
pretend to be friends.We would often
have dinner with our respective families, and we would go for long walks by the
river to relish in our discussions and on occasion our passions.

Once in a while, late at night, I
would sneak up over the porch and into the second floor window of her bedroom
and we would sleep in each other’s arms until morning.And then I would carry my tee shirt and shoes
to the window and quietly slip down the porch column and down by the river, and
walk the one quarter mile to my parked car in the clearing.

That
summer went by easy until it all came down.It was a particularly quiet summer night.The air had cooled and some of the humidity
had shaken out of the air.The moon was
as full as I have ever seen it.I had
left my shoes hanging from a tree by the river and ascended the porch into her
dimly lit room.She had snuck a glass of
milk for me and was waiting in her chair.It was far too quiet in the room.I asked her to turn the ceiling fan on.I kissed her and we fell asleep both topless in our jeans on top of the
sheets.

It was a heart attack from the
deepest dead of sleep.I awoke to the
sound of the door closing and Sara leaped from the bed to peer out the cracked
door just in time to see her Mom descending the stairs her hand over her mouth
and a shocked reluctance in her gait.With the white noise from the fan, we didn’t hear her come up the stairs
or crack open the door to peer inside.

Sara
hung her head and cried silently.I laid
there in the dark with one hand on her sweaty, naked back lying on my stomach
on the edge of the bed.She was kneeling
on the floor, and we held this pose like statues for several minutes, shocked
still and still awake.

Finally
we had been found out.There was nothing
left to do but admit it.We walked
downstairs and told Sara’s mothers that we were in love with each other, and
that we weren’t ashamed of it at all.We
explained how close we were and hoped that they would see it from our
perspective.For extra proof, it seems,
I was subconsciously holding my hand on her back, now draped casually in my
tee-shirt.They took it much better than
we had anticipated.Of course, her
parents were more liberal than mine.

My mothers were not so accepting,
although sometimes they surprised me.One time my Mama woke me up at three in the morning, exclaiming that it
was chocolate chip cookie time, and proceeded to scoop me out of bed and plop
me down, two floors later, on the kitchen stool so that I could watch as she
cranked up the music and danced around the kitchen, singing into the wooden
spoon, which was covered, like she was, in cookie batter.My Mama was the crazy one and my Mom would
just smile from wherever she was, each time remembering why she fell in love
with Mama in the first place.But as
crazy as they could be, my parents were very careful to be proper in public and
fit in with societies expectations.They were not boat-rockers.They
were conformists, at least in appearance, and Mom did all she could to uphold
that façade.It worked. They were very
well respected in town and people thought of them as model citizens.

Sara’s
Mom and Mama were not so well thought of.They were a little bit liberal for many of the townsfolk.They listened to music that maybe they
shouldn’t, and they attended those, ‘left’ poetry readings at the Sunset
downtown.People knew that they had some
radical ideas, but they were still accepted.They did subscribe, at least in their own actions, to normal
things.I had always gotten a sense
though, that they weren’t ‘normal’ for political reasons.The way that they were just happened to be
the normal thing.The fact that their
preferences were normal was completely unaffected by the term.They just were, and people sensed some
rebellion in that, and had shown some disdain for them.It was the reason that there were rumors that
Sara’s Mom had had some ‘experience' with boys in college.They always chalked it up to ‘she was
confused.’She always said that it could
have been a boy in the end, except that she had fallen in love with Sara’s
Mama.She held her head very high
whenever she told the stories.They were
great for Sara.I think it was the
reason that Sara had so much gracefulness about her.

Now,
standing in my wedding suit, I noticed a flash of white in the window; one of
those terrible ‘marriage equals’ signs.Just words, but, I think I heard another gumball fall.

It
was the words that got to you in the end.They became so engrained in culture that they were casually used to
express the slightest things.Kids would
‘joke’ and call each ‘arrow’ or other such things.To them it seems so harmless, but it
isn’t.Hate was made easy by these
childish indiscretions.It seems for
some people ‘God’ makes it easy to hate too.Other words like ‘shot’ ‘aimer’ and ‘docker’ are seemingly reserved for
jokes with an undertone of implication.

There
were worse ones.They seemed to want to
make us out to be hunt-able.They called
us ‘mals.’It came from the idea that
because we could make a child the way animals did, we were no better than
animals themselves.As if cross-gendered
mating was reserved for disgusting things that dogs do in the woods.They had all become so much more civilized
since they made their made-to-order babies in test-tubes and one of them would
carry the baby to term.The bulk of
society had the opinion that our casual screwing would result in a plague of
unplanned children that would overpopulate the world.People only subconsciously acknowledged the
origin of these words that they used with such frequency.It made it easy for people to not have to
think, and to not have to be intelligent.The words made it easy for them to learn how to hate.We were straight and they made us, whoever we
all were, stare it in the eye every day.Every time one of those words is ‘casually’ used it cuts to the core and
flays a soul right down to the architecture.“Damned, straight as an arrow, aren’t they?”I hated that one.Words are a disease.

Sara
and I used to sit out on the roof of my garage, outside my bedroom window, at
night.We would watch for shooting stars
and talk.She would often ask me what it
was exactly that made people so interested in other people’s lives, and
controlling them.I could never explain
it to her.But they were getting nastier
lately.We couldn’t understand why they
wouldn’t see that it had nothing to do with them or their lives. They just
seemed to want to impose rules about ‘what they wanted us to not have.’“The large tablets giveth and the small minds
taketh away,” I would say.I never
understood it.We weren’t hurting
anybody, but as today grew closer it got a little scary.At first they were just writing letters to
the paper, and telling us we should call it off.There were marches and “Marriage = Femme +
Femme or Man + Man” signs.It all seemed
harmless to us; maybe a bit of a cancer on the free-thinking world, but not
dangerous at all.Now it’s gone to
far.We were getting threats.So were my mothers.And hers were too.

We
talked to our mothers about it.We had
dinner and invited them all together one night and simply asked them what they
thought about us calling it off.They
all agreed that we had come too far and that it wasn’t right for them to force
us into changing our minds.Surprisingly, my slightly conservative Mom even said it.“Forget about small people,” she said.So we did.

And
here we were, listening to heckling from outside.I don’t know how they found out about the
time or place.I think it was one of my
cousins.We didn’t invite any of them,
but I’m sure that they had heard about it.

I
read an article in the local paper recently.It was a letter to the editor.The ignorance that people possess and proudly exhibit blows my mind
sometimes.It was full of the usual
things like, ‘It’s immoral,’ and phrases like, ‘…behind closed doors, but I
don’t want to hear about it.’I try not to blame ignorant people because
their god tells them that these things are wrong, but there is no truth in
preaching.Someday the world will learn
this.There is too much self-interest
for God to get his message across.It’s
the most fucked up game of telephone that there ever was.

Suddenly
I saw a phrase that I had not yet seen and could not believe.The article was the usual slurry of hatred
and bigotry, dressed up to appear politically correct and potentially
well-thought, until it crawled into the darkest of statements: “They try to say
it’s natural.If they want to go to hell
that’s their problem, they aren’t taking a word that God gave us with
them.Say we do relent and allow them to
be ‘married.’What’s next after a man
and a woman?A man and a little
girl?A woman and a little boy.A sheep?How far will this thing go.It
isn’t natural!”

I
was infuriated, gumdrops pouring from my pockets.I am in no way a pedophile because I am in
love with a woman.And what about the
sheep?What is that?These people are ridiculous.I didn’t know what to say.I just sank into the corner and cried.Like their precious 'Mother Mary' I cried and
cried.I cried for all of the people who
could not see love.Who could not see the
damage that they do in the name of their ‘God.’No matter what you believe, we all answer to the same thing, whatever it
is.And I can’t believe in a god that
cares for these religious-types, and who hates so callously.

That day, it was my Mom that found
me and held me as a cried.I was
eighteen and sobbing in the arms of my mother.She was providing me with comfort, she didn’t’ realize that it was the
world that I was crying for.

It was time, now, for the
toast.My mom had decided that she
wanted to make it.She walked over and
cracked the window.Then she walked
back, champagne in hand, and bowed to us.She then turned around to toast the open window.

“God is lost on you, and so is
love.So here is a toast to arrows just
like my son and his beautiful Sara across the world.They will be heard.They will have all of the rights afforded to
man couples.And femme couples.It will take time and love, it will take
work.I believe in a world where we are
all on the same plane.When ‘natural’
children won’t be made fun of at school and when they won’t hear about ‘hell’
and rumors about their mom and dad on the playground.We’ll chip away at it.A revolution of love is slow work.This toast is to the bigots of the
world.May love surround you and force
you to surrender.And for God’s sake,
may you learn to shut your fucking mouths.”

We all sat in shock.I didn’t even think my Mom was totally cool
with our relationship, and none of us had ever heard a word like that pass over
her lips.She let out a whoop and a tear
and then turned around.She was smiling
and crying and so was Sara.

Then she proceeded, “and to the
beautiful couple.Your love is pure, may
you always have it.It is greater than
anything that there is.”

I guess people are always afraid of
what is different.The only thing about
it is, Sara and I weren’t that different.They just can’t see it.I
wondered, as I watched my mom toasting the window, if Colorado had actually made things better for
us.Maybe we would have been content to
live beneath the radar without it.And
then, suddenly, the thought vanished for good.It was chased away by the last person whom I thought loved me with any
small exception, my Mom.It was at that
moment that I realized that there is no such thing.

The
yelling outside grew louder.It had
become impossible to ignore the commotion out on the street.I could see my guests becoming slightly
nervous.To make them more comfortable I
jumped up from my seat and exclaimed, “let’s dance,” and as the window shattered
and the fire exploded inside of the room my pocket ripped out and the rest of
my gumballs fell to the ground, rolling into the street and gutter.This time I didn’t’ hear them.I didn’t notice.I was finally at peace and meeting Sara for a
movie.